The perception of formant-frequency range is affected by veridical and judged fundamental frequency
Santiago Barreda, Terrance M. Nearey · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2013
The vowels produced by different speakers vary in terms of their fundamental frequency (f0) and formant frequencies (FFs). Variation in the production of a given vowel category between speakers of different sizes is primarily according to a single multiplicative parameter (related to speaker vocal-tract length). This parameter, which we refer to as FF-scaling, has an associated perceptual quality that listeners may use to determine apparent speaker characteristics and vowel quality. In a previous experiment [Barreda & Nearey. 2011. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 129, p. 2661], listeners were trained to identify a limited set of voices based on FF-scaling and f0 differences. The current study presented listeners with large number of voices (n = 4000) varying in FF-scaling and f0, arranged in a two-dimensional space where one dimension corresponded to each acoustic characteristic. Listeners were played a voice, and asked to indicate its location on the board, thereby providing an f0 and FF-scaling estimate for the voice. Results indicate that listeners are able to identify voice FF-scaling, and that this decision is informed primarily by veridical voice FF-scaling. However, there is a complicated relationship between perceived f0 and FF-scaling, suggesting an interdependent relationship in the perception of these characteristics.